[adrian_b]

Microsoft had FORTRAN and COBOL compilers for CP/M. I have used them on both Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80.

The MS FORTRAN compiler was decent enough. It could be used to make programs that were much faster than those using the Microsoft BASIC interpreter.

Even if you preferred to write some program in assembly, if that program needed to do some numeric computations it was convenient to use the MS Fortran run-time library, which contained most of the Fortran implementation work, because the Fortran compiler generated machine code which consisted mostly of invocations of the functions from the run-time library.

However, for that you had to reverse-engineer the library first, because it was not documented by Microsoft. Nevertheless, reverse-engineering CP/M applications was very easy, because an experienced programmer could read a hexadecimal dump almost as easy as the assembly language source code. Microsoft used a few code obfuscation tricks, but those could not be very effective in such small programs.